Merging Objects or Materials aka Compression Tool

[damaz10]

Okay, before I get started on this tutorial I want to make one thing clear. I do not take credit for making this object that I am about to tell you about. All credit goes to TINTED who is the creator of this awesome tool. He is a member here but since he hasn't been around, it's time he gets recognition for an amazing object that he created which allows you merge materials and objects together!

Now that that's said it's time to MERGE! I am going to show you how to efficiently merge any object, material together without as much as saying nun-uh! The object looks like this and is what is responsible for allowing objects, materials etc. to be merged

To get this object go to TINTED's level titled "P3HP Club" You need a code to get this tool and the code can be found here He also has a few levels which show off more of what the compression tool can do. COMPRESSION TOOL Tutorial *make black hole, atom bombs and more! and Compression Tool Technologies. Note: There is also a similar compression tool made by tooth_pick210 that does basically the same thing, there is no code to get this one though, and it's in the shape of a right facing arrow
Now watch in awe as I combine story mode objects together!

Now some of you may be wondering "how can you combine the story objects? They aren't editable!" Well thanks to this object created by TINTED, anything can be merged together, even if they are story mode objects! The object show above causes a glitch in the lbp engine which I can't really understand fully, I can say that it does cause objects/materials to occupy the same space with others and when they do occupy the same space, they act indepently of each other. Aya042 explains a little about it on page 3 and 4 of this thread, and croissantbuncake shows how to make your own on page 4

-As you can see in these here pictures, the objects are acting seperate of each other, I have one selected while it's merged with the other.
-Now there are some rules that come with using this object which I will explain to you, most of these are found on TINTED's level which gives you this object
RULE 1: this tool can only work in pause mode with gride mode off
-This rule makes sense because when an object/material is paused, is dosn't have motion, so it will not break when paused as opposed to having motion and breaking because it's in the same space as another object/material
RULE 2: object/materials can only be merged on the right side of the compression tool
-This object can only work with everything to the right of it. Anything on the left will act normally and not merge together like it can on the right side

-Before I get to rule number 3 you should understand how to properly merge the objects. Basically all you do is move the object/material into the space of the other object/material. Normally these would collide and not take up the same space, but with the compression too out and in pause mode, it works.
RULE 3: Objects/materials can only be merged by moving one into the space of another, you cannot 'paste' objects into each, they must be placed, and then moved into the same space.
RULE 4: Objects that are merged must be glued together before exiting pause mode
-Again, this makes sense because if they were not glued together they would act like the 3d glitch does when you have overlappin moving materials in the background, they would end up breaking. See edit below for more indepth about how to glue compressed objects
TIP: This tool causes a lag when out in the creating field. It is perfectly fine to have this, when you are done with the tool and everthing you want is merged, delete the compression tool and the lag will go away. This causes problems when you have more than 1 person in create mode. I would caution you when using this tool with others with you because the game goes into serious lag and is may cause players to lag out. I would recommend having 2 people at max when using this object. Any more and it just makes it more difficult to use this object.

Now for some fun with this tool. Even wanted to make a canopy of a jungle using doll heads? How about the bird feather object? Now these are just ides for what can be accomplished with this compression tool here are a few pictures to demonstrate how cool this tool is when used properly.


-Now for the bird feathers to be properly merged, I had to embed some dark matter in them before they were merged because they have an flapping motion that would have made them break if they weren't stationary
How about merging lights into other objects?

Here I have a shot from my beach that's in my current level in progress see if you can spot where I used the compression tool

Need a closer look?

Now if you looked ahead, cheater! Now here are some arrows to point out where materials are merged together.

Here is a pic of how ugly it looks without the merging of the sand

Now another cool thing to do with it is making a custom scoreboard! All that is necessary is a thin piece of material, here I uses cardboard, decorate the material and merge it and tada! A custom scoreboard!

-Now an interesting thing I forgot to mention is that the compression tool works on the 3d glitch as well, very handy for moving things in the 3d background that need that teeny little adjustment.
I guess that's all for this tutorial, again all credit goes to TINTED for creating this compression tool. Now get to creating and merging! Peace!

Edit: WAIT! I forgot to mention 2 important things!
1: the tool can look unpleasant if the merged objects/materials are merged too far together.- To get an example, look at the picture below closely where the kings staff is, it resembles the mgs plasma ball and it happens when one material is merged far in another material. Again some of you may want this and some may not. If you don't want this to happen, slightly merge the objects/materials and it should look normal

2: You cannot corner edit any merged objects.- This is important to remember if you are trying to build set pieces for say the ground. I believe you can add to the materials via pasting, but I'm not 100% sure, when I find out I will update this thread. Edit: Okay yes you can paste to merged materials but not corner edit them, if they are the same material and you paste into both, they will become one material and not 2 seperate compressed materials
3. Some objects will not merge together properly- I found out from TINTED that bombs will not glue after they are merged.They will however shoot out erradically when unpaused making some cool explosions. TINTED's acid bomb which you can get from his compression tool level shows this off very efficiently
List of things that won't glue together after being merged
-bombs
-spotlights
I will update this list if I find any others that don't glue when merged
Major Edit: After some tinkering with this tool, I came to the conclusion that anything not made of "materials" (light, bombs, doll head, spotlights, etc.) do not glue together when merged, as opposed to being able to glue together when not merged. To get Objects to merge properly together you need to either glue dark matter or any material to the compressed objects say like a thin layer, OR compress some material into the objects and glue it from the inside. Materials will always glue wherever compressed, objects will not. Hope that helps ya'll Peace!

[Sehven•]

Interesting. I'll have to give this a try next time I'm on. Seems like it'd be easier to get precise results than using the emitter method.

[edit] Here's the results of me using this trick:

Before


After.

It loses something in the screencap process, but the eyes look much cooler (they're embedded fairy lights now, unlike the leds stuck to the front in the before pic). Her um.... thingies... um... she's more well endowed (balloons ). Her hood fits better: it's thack material and it's embedded so that the peak at the top actually covers a bit of her head, so it's more like a real hood. And her skirt fits the body better (valentine's heart shaped pillows embedded into the body instead of ugly material wrapped around it).

I could've done all of this with the emitter trick, but it would've taken for-freakin-ever. Thanks for this tut, and thanks to TINTED for making the tool. I'm curious how it was done. Looks like several of the glass squares are overlapping, but I can't tell what the tiny thing in the middle is. I guess I could try tearing it apart, but I don't think I care that much.

[Incinerator22•]

Thanks a million for making this tutorial! Some people fail to see that the merge glitch is more than just a way to make holographic TV's or bigger bombs, and your examples to how it can make levels better is great.

[damaz10]

To Sehven and Incincerator22 thanks for the support! I wasn't sure if anyone knew about this tool so it's cool that I could give a tutorial about it. LOVE the way that you made the angel/skull thing Sehven. I recently spoke with TINTED on psn and he was very thankful that I made this tutorial since he wasn't sure if anyone understood his tutorial level on LBP. Merging is the tool of the future!

[rtm223]

It's certainly interesting. I've been playing around with merging mesh objects using emitters recently for some visual effects using the emitter glitch and TBH, don't find it half as much hassle as sehven seems to be implying This is cool though, for results that don't require grid alignment it will certainly speed things up. Sadly, most of the stuff I'm trying to get done does require grid aligning, but I'll be sure to pick up this tool next time I'm online.

[damaz10]

Yes! I have made a difference to rtm223's creating. How long before merging leads to the take-over of the emmitter glitch? But seriously, yeah it seems to me that the emmitter glitch can be more of a hassle, but for you rtm223 I guess your like a master Now get out that compression tool and make some magic!

[Sehven•]

don't find it half as much hassle as sehven seems to be implying

Not a huge hassle. You do have to do things one at a time and you can't see the end result until after you emit. Then, if it's not right, you have to rewind, move the emitter and try again. With the compression tool, you can position the objects and get real-time results that you can see, so you're not re-emitting several times to get an object to move the tiniest bit up and to the right or whatever. .....but then I don't use the grid much.

I've gone back and improved another of the characters I've made (this one hasn't been in a level, and may never be: it's been a kind of back-burner project that I rarely work on), and made a new one. I'm finally able to cover up the head on the Psycho Mantis doll so I can use him to make a unique character. I'll upload pics later.

[rtm223]

As I said, if not using the grid then this would certainly be the way to go. For the record, with the emitters I was simply placing the object onto the back layer, setting the emitter to emit in front of it and then moving the object forwards before the emitter fires. In front view you can easilly see how things line up. And of course if using the grid it's even less of a pain.

[Sehven•]

Ah. It's kind of funny, 'cuz I've used that technique to set up compression overlaps, but I didn't for emitters where it would've been more useful. Or maybe I did. Now that I think about it, I think I did try that with early attempts to embed eggs or balloons into the doll body..... why are you looking at me like that?! It's not wierd at all to go to all that trouble just to increase a goofy looking doll's chest size in a video game. Anyway, when I'd emit, I'd be surprised at how meshes looked when they were overlapped: some parts would be sticking through others more or less than I'd wanted and I had to try again. So yeah, for a shoots-from-the-hip kinda' guy like me, the compression tool is easier.

I was pretty excited when I first read your blog about emitter blocking though, and I have used it in some of my work. Good stuff.

[edit] Got pics of the new ones.




Once again the low quality picture tool rears its ugly head. The first is just a doll I put together with this method. The second is that doll adapted into a Mother Nature character for my backburner project (looks MUCH better than the old one: her .... bosom... is actually part of her chest now instead of floating in front of it). The third will probably be the final boss in my "War of Souls" series (if I ever get back to work on it). He actually looks quite a bit cooler in-game: I've embedded burning objects into his upper chest and head to give his skull a sort of Ghostrider look. I also set his eye-lights on fire which looked awesome, but in the photo they just came out black, so I delethalized them for picture taking.

[damaz10]

Duudddeee... I am loving the characters that you made Sehven. I look forward to that psycho mantis in your War of Souls series if you do decide to go and continue it. I should add more pics of stuff I made with the compression tool. I add some later on when I can.

[cdubb024]

Cool Beans! Thanks damaz for posting this. Nice Balloons Sehven.

[damaz10]

NP, always happy to pay the bill...err I mean to make a helpful tutorial

[RoharDragontamer•]

Compressing large balloons FTW!

[Sehven•]

Anybody have any ideas on objects that could be put together to make a better doll head? I've tried using an egg, but when I try to paint a face on it, it gets all distorted toward the edges (the eyes gets squished in toward the middle of the face). The poofy hair worked for my mother nature character, but I'd like to make other characters sans poofy hair. In particular, the first one I showed: the skull angel chick; once the final boss has been defeated and her soul is truly free, I'd like her to have a human face.... but not poofy hair.

Oh. And those were small balloons, btw. Large ones would've looked ridiculous... er... MORE ridiculous.

[YEAH_NAH]

ssshhhh dont let MM find out or they will patch it , sssshhhh

[Morgana25]

Cool! Never knew you could do this

[jwwphotos]

Hey... that does look quite handy!

[damaz10]

Thanks guys! I really wanted to show this to everyone on LBPC because I know it could be very handy to those who wanted to go even further with creating via merging objects and materials. Hopefully everyone will get a chance to play with this and make some awesome additions to their levels.

[Richasackboy]

I'm gonna get this. Now.

>=D

Think of what you could do with the underminer's drill!

[Aya042]

Think of what you could do with the underminer's drill!

I can pretty much guarantee that you won't be able to use it to make any other object rotate (excluding decorations), but it would be really cool if I were wrong.